In the current information age, there are often discussions of the desirableness of a paperless society. However, notwithstanding such discussions, there remains a great need by users of computers and other information terminals (that is, any of the various conventional devices which have a need to print on demand, such as personal computers, notebook computers, workstations, other types of computers, kiosks, PDAs, other information appliances, etc.) for printing functionality. Therefore, devices having printing or plotting functionality, such as printers, copiers, multi-function devices, etc., continue to play a significant role in information technology (IT) at home, at work, as well as elsewhere (for example, away from the office and/or home).
In many circumstances, the user is charged a fee for printing. For example, kiosks are provided in some transportation depots and other public areas to enable users to access assorted content (for example, e-mails, web pages, other selected web content, etc.) via the Internet or otherwise, and the user may be charged a fee to print. As another example, Internet cafes provide members of the public with Internet access, for a fee, through personal computers, and the user may be charged an additional fee to print from the computers. In addition, some enterprises and organizations recoup some or all of the cost of IT facilities by charging usage fees (such as for each use, each specified time period, etc.) for selected IT functionalities to users or to the group or department with which the user is associated.
However, there are other ways of recouping the cost of IT facilities, other than by charging a usage fee.
Conventional printers process print jobs received from user terminals and typically output a printout that faithfully represents the print job received from the user terminal. However, there are many instances in which one or more areas of a printout are unused, and can be used for other purposes to minimize waste of paper.
For example, a printer can be configured through appropriate settings to automatically print cover or partition sheets that contain information such as the identity of the print job, the time, the name of the user who sent the print job, etc., to accompany the printout of the print job submitted by the user. Such cover or partition sheets serve to identify the print job corresponding to the accompanying printout. However, such cover or partition sheets typically have little use after the printout is picked up by the user. Further, such cover or partition sheets typically have much unused space. It has been proposed in U.S. application Ser. No. 09/563,266, to merge advertisements, such as coupons and other marketing information, with a print job, by printing the advertisements on unused space on cover sheets and partition sheets which are printed with a print job.
In addition, it has been proposed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-7782, to combine advertisements with a print job by superimposing the advertisements on a margin area of the printout.
Further, some current point-of-sales systems print receipts on paper that has preprinted advertisements on the back of the paper.
However, conventional printing systems which print an advertisement along with a print job print the same (one or more) advertisements over and over.
There is need for an improved technique for recouping the cost of printing which in addition allows advertisers to couple their advertisements to a print medium in a dynamic and relevant manner.